Unposted Twitter rant re: "meat & potatoes" storytelling in comics

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UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Just refreshed this poll in another window, and now the content options "Vintage Con Sketches" and "Twitter rant on meat & potatoes storytelling in comics" are tied with 26 votes each, dagnabbit. I'll monitor the poll throughout the morning to see if one of the options noses ahead in the voting, and post the winner immediately.

FINAL UPDATE: This sucker nosed ahead to 27 votes! PUBLISH NOW!

And now, time for another Twitter-formatted rant written a few years ago but never actually posted on social media; this was composed back in the era of the 140-character limit, so a few of the tweets have been merged for clarity's sake. Here we go:

Can’t quite recall the phrasing, but I dimly recall a comics creator a while back advising that mundane scenes should use humdrum, “meat-and-potatoes” storytelling; save the bold, eye-catching shots and wild, “showy” layouts for crazier scenes.

That seems a sensible narrative approach for comics, but now I’m starting to wonder about how universally applicable that might really be.

I agree more in terms of page layout than individual shot composition. A crazy, over-the-top layout for a fairly mundane scene seems goofy.

My issue with intense, bizarre layout schemes & shot choices isn’t that they overexcite the reader, but that they can be confusing as hell.

A certain well-received series from the recent past that rocked showy, avant-garde layout schemes was, I found, often sabotaging clarity with graphic design run amuck.

I would think, “Gosh, that’s design-y as all get-out, but what the hell is going on is this scene? Can’t tell, but sure looks pretty!” Ughh.

Then again, “meat and potatoes” doesn’t have to mean “dull, boring and listless,” so much as “not utterly crazy, intense and over-the-top.”

Obvsly, definitions of “meat and potatoes” vary. Some might define Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez that way, as his compositions aren’t cuhRAZY.

But for me, Garcia-Lopez’s draftmanship is so spectacular that his pages are never “meat and potatoes,” but always sweet, sweet dessert.

Ah, but while a comic with inappropriately, excessively “crazy/intense” artwork and shot composition in every panel sounds flawed in theory, I dunno if I’ve ever actually seen a comic like that. Hell, I might like to see a comic like that, with truly “every shot hot,” as it were.

The manga Air Gear and Noragami might be examples, as they often feature gorgeous artwork & unusual compositions for fairly mundane scenes.

Minor plot points and casual conversations in those manga are often depicted with extravagantly beautiful art and bold, striking layouts.

Can’t say for sure if the “hotness” is a narrative flaw, as I read both Air Gear and Noragami far more for their artwork than their stories. 

A while back, I saw a comic page on Instagram that depicted a mundane scene—blue-collar fella returns home after work—with strong artwork and slightly unusual layouts.

Non-panoramic establishing shot; worm’s-eye view in a character-intro panel; dramatically tight close-up. The page was, arguably, a bit “showy.”

In theory, this page’s artwork was too interesting to convey mundane activity, but hey, better to err on the side of strong art than weak. 

>Note: The previous lines were referring to some early work by the excellent artist Lewis La Rosa.<

Also depends on the narrative. If a story depicts mundane, humdrum real life suddenly disrupted by shocking violence or magical unreality, it’s clearly poor storytelling for the early, establishing scenes to be told via art & layouts as intense as the later, disruptive scenes.

But for stories that hit the ground running and lead off with crazy intensity, I’m starting to wonder: Why NOT try to make “every shot hot?”

With a bajillion g-d comics coming out every month, I don’t know that any given book has the luxury of flirting with dullness and tedium, even as a deliberate storytelling choice.

Worse yet, any given comic is also competing for eyes and mindspace with a bajillion other forms of flashier, higher-budget entertainment. (Plus, any given direct-market comic’s numbers are being relentlessly piranha’d by the dreaded “standard attrition,” but that’s another story.)

With ever-dwindling pagecounts (on mainstream comics at least), can the creator afford to blow very many of those precious few pages on well-intentioned “boring” scenes?

Aaaand that's as far as I got on this particular rant before running out of steam, folks. Still brings up some interesting questions for Western comics, though.

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